


Come the avarice

by Toothless



Series: coil my tongue [5]
Category: Justified
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Always a Girl!Raylan, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-31
Updated: 2014-01-31
Packaged: 2018-01-10 16:39:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 721
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1162043
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Toothless/pseuds/Toothless
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She dreams of machines that can take her away, she dreams of resting between the crest of a bird’s wings, of fleeing this holler, this place, this earth that has her shackled.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Come the avarice

i.

Boyd is a criminal in a way Raylan could never be. She exists on extremes, on treading the edges of things, as delicate as an eyelash on the edge of a thumb.

Everything that happens is an extension of that tightrope act, determined and balanced by her temper.

Morality has its own private shrine in her chest, a temple of things she _does_ and does _not_ do. If Raylan were a library there would be, in the midst of tatty gun manuals and secret (always secret) novels of bravery and heartache, of knights and dragons and castles in deep woods, a single tome, huge and ancient and robed in gossamer dust, and it would read: RULES.

If Boyd were a library, there would be no books at all. If Boyd were a library, he would write his own books.

 

ii.

Boyd’s taking a job in the mine, says he’s going to be digging coal like an honest man, going to provide. Raylan only feels the thread of slow discontent sewing itself along the edges of her mouth, pulled tight from the knot around her heart.

She thinks of Frances’s hand on her shoulder and that one time promise, and how much worse that had been from all the rest. How much worse it had felt to have held a tiny glimpse of light in her hands and then to stand in the dark when it had faded and died - its phantom shades leaving the edges sharper and longer than before - than to stand in the darkness when there had been no light at all.  

 

Frances had once told her that she had an old soul, that there was something of the mountain in her. She looks at Boyd and wonders if he sees that too, if he feels he needs to climb into the black of the earth to wear her skin.

 

iii.

Raylan dreams of fast cars that outpace the coal trains, that eat the distance ‘til the horizon. She dreams of machines that can take her away, she dreams of resting between the crest of a bird’s wings, of fleeing this holler, this place, this earth that has her shackled.

 

iv.

It doesn’t last because it can’t last. Raylan is not made for cages.

 

Boyd tries because he loves her and Raylan because she loves him back.

In a way, that’s the problem.

Sometimes she feels as if they live in a dream world, the hazy, blurred version of reality. Harlan is hard and hardships, is coal mining and thick woods, is moonshine and crime. Harlan is the county that God forgot, she thinks. It’s their home as surely as anything and Raylan hates it.

 

They lie on the backs in Boyd’s crappy old truck, legs intermingled, close enough that Raylan is unsure where she ends and Boyd begins. She imagines sometimes that their hearts beat in perfect tandem, as if they’d merged into a single being.

 _I want to leave_ , she thinks of saying, but that is in part a lie. _I’m leaving_ is closer to the truth. But that tastes bitter in her mouth, like cigarette ashes, like promises. She thinks of Frances then, of finding her and hating her and of the choking, terrible stillness that had unfolded inside of her, a vacuum in her chest, slowly expanding.

Harlan is a ferris wheel of repeated mistakes, of history that is old and ancient but still new all the same. She sees herself beside Boyd in a house of their own, with children, with the mountain feeding them, with herself, an old woman, dressed in Frances’ skin.

She imagines Harlan, the never ending circulation of grudges and vengeance, and herself, always herself in the end. And that is always the worst.

 

“I can’t stay,” she says in the end, because that is the closest she can come to the truth. She doesn’t say it to his face, doesn’t whisper it in his ear at night when they seek each other like lost children in the dark, doesn’t call him from her car, from the shitty motel. She doesn’t write him four months later, when she’s studying for her exams, or two years later, when she’s a Marshall.

  
  
She has a gun at her hip and hat on her head, and a heart heavy with words unspoken.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Titles are borrowed from the Decemberists' "This is Why We Fight", "June Hymn" and "Down By the Water".


End file.
